Thomas Carlyle Quotes
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Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.
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Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
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Pin thy faith to no man's sleeve. Hast thou not two eyes of thy own?
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In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
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He that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.
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Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.
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He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
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Habit and imitation--there is nothing more perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all working, and all apprenticeship, of all practice, and all learning, in this world.
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When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more. Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar!
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What you see, but can't see over is as good as infinite.
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For every one hundred men who can stand adversity there is only one who can withstand prosperity.
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Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
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Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do that with all thy might and leave the issues calmly to God.
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Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, - till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.
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All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!
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High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.
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Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on.
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All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.
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He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.
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Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.
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A dandy is a clothes-wearing man--a man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, person and purse is heroically consecrated to this one object--the wearing of clothes, wisely and well; so that, as others dress to live, he lives to dress.
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Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this earth.